Wakanda Forever Review

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. © 2022 MARVEL.

Marvel Studios

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. © 2022 MARVEL.

Emma Brinke, Reporter

Marvel has brought honor to a loss and memorial to Chadwick Boseman. Ryan Coogler was challenged to make the movie Black Panther: Wakanda Forever because, with the death of the star actor of the franchise, they had to rewrite the entire script to put in the secondary characters. Ryan Coogle’s take on the movie has much thought on losing someone important and what you must do to go through grief. I liked the portrayal of how Namor makes sure his people will be protected by bringing genocide to all on earth. The crew agreed not to cast a new T’Challa, a good choice for Marvel to not ruin an iconic character. The movie starts without an eyewitness of the form of  T’Challa’s body dying. Then the plot dives into the characters from the first movie and their world without  T’Challa. The loss of their protector brought Wakanda a feeling of uncertainty because they didn’t know if their world was safe from the other threats, but one issue that always comes back to the nation is whether the world will get a hold of vibranium .

These critics had some good things to say. Kristy Buchko from Mashable says while action-packed, at its core the movie is about how people handle loss differently. This is shown by how T’Challa’s mother Queen Ramonda, and his sister Shuri when Buchko says, “What do we owe to those we’ve lost? Is their legacy our responsibility? Or are we responsible for our own legacies? Might their memory bolster us or blind us to what our futures could be without them?”

Moria MacDonald from the Seattle Times wrote “Boseman’s T’Challa is a spirit that lovingly haunts the film.” She says it doesn’t shy away from the sadness of the loss; this is, after all, a superhero movie.  Wakanda Forever lets the audience and characters absorb the loss, not simply moving forward from it. Macdonald says, “This makes you think of the movie that was never made, never getting to see it with the person in it, a life cut too short.”

I like both of these comments the most from these women. They had the same perspective as how I saw it.

But here’s what I truly think of the message in the film. You don’t know how hard it is to get over the loss of someone you love very much, you don’t know how long you have with them and you don’t know if you could deal with it by thinking they are truly gone or that they’re still here with us. When his sister took on the position as the Black Panther, she didn’t feel like she took over her brother’s honor in being this superhero but let it live on. Other than that, I loved the way they opened the title with Chadwick in them, telling him to rest in peace, the introduction of RiRi Williams aka Iron Heart, Michael B Jordan’s cameo in the movie,  and the underwater city they showed. And by the end when it showed T’Challa’s son, he truly isn’t gone.  He still lives on and a new generation will show that in the future, hopefully. I’d give this movie a 3.9/5 rating.

I have to say I thought it was decent to watch, putting things together pretty well, with new plot lines for the old and new cast of characters. I can’t wait to see more in future projects.